KIRKUS REVIEW

The latest from redoubtable historian Gates
(African-American Research/Harvard Univ.; Life Upon These Shores: Looking at
African American History, 1513-2008, 2011, etc.) is not, despite the title, about finding your roots.
A companion text to the popular PBS series, and following his similar Faces
of America (2010), it’s about finding the roots of 25 American
notables of diverse ethnicity.

From Branford Marsalis to Wanda Sykes, Sanjay Gupta to Harry
Connick Jr., Cory Booker to Barbara Walters, the histories are uniformly told.
The author introduces the subject of each inquiry with a concise biography and
some apt words from the honoree. There follows the parade of progenitors
discovered through oral history and documents like immigration records, realty
transactions and census rolls. Experts were often enlisted. Finally, DNA was
used to trace genealogy, sometimes back to the Ice Age. It appears that Martha
Stewart is descended from craftspeople, and through the veins of Robert Downey
Jr. flows a bit of Jewish blood. As many readers will suspect, climbing
the family trees of these famous figures proves that many of us are
related—perhaps not even six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon (his
ancestry goes back to Edward I, and Brad Pitt is Bacon’s 13th cousin twice
removed). Throughout these family tapestries are a variety of common
threads—e.g., poverty, name changes and mistreatment. Integral to the nation’s
history are the sorry annals of slavery as narrated by Gates in the
African-Americans’ case studies. Their stories are particularly moving.
Unfortunately, the TV format proves static on the printed page. Despite the
persecuted emigrants, the tycoons, the slave masters and all the other colorful
ancestral characters populating Gates’ passionate research, the individual
tales rarely spring to life. Other subjects in the collection include Rick Warren,
Condoleezza Rice, John Legend and Adrian Grenier.

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